Tip’s Musings for His Grandchildren

A Grandfather Sits Down to Talk

In the early 1990s, Sidney “Tip” Melby sat down and began to write to his children and grandchildren. He was born in 1915 on the high plains where the two Dakotas meet Montana, the son of Christopher Cranston and Elizabeth Lillian Campbell. What he set down by hand was not a memoir and was never meant to be one. He called it what it is — musings. Prairie and sod houses, sheep and horses, a one-room school, the Depression, a marriage, a move over the Divide to Montana, and whatever else came to him as he wrote.
His son, Pat Melby, has written comments below.. On balance, the words in “Tip’s Musings” are Tip’s own.

Read it the way it was written — as though you were sitting in the room while he talked. Click the link below and take your time with it.

Click on this link to access the full document.

Tips Musings – Edited by Patrick Melby

PATRICK’S MUSINGS ON “TIPS MUSINGS FOR HIS GRANDCHILDREN”

Sometime before my father, S.T. “Tip” Melby died in 2005, he gave each of my siblings and me a copy of a 54-page handwritten document that appeared at first sight to be a lengthy essay on his life, especially his early years in South Dakota.

I volunteered to transcribe the pages and provide the transcribed version to my brother and sisters. Alas, while I had good intentions, the transcription never got finished. Oh, I started it but, even though my father had beautiful cursive handwriting, I ran into many words that I couldn’t accurately decipher. I always planned to sit down with Dad and ask him to translate those words for me, but I waited too long and never got the task done before his death. So, the document got stuck away in a file cabinet in my home office.

Until now.

While recently visiting with my cousin Charlie Jett about the wonderful web site he has created, “The Cranstons – The Descendants of Christopher (Doc) Cranston and Bess Melby”, I remembered Tips handwritten document. I scanned it and emailed it to Charlie. He asked Claude, an AI program, to transcribe it. He emailed the transcription back to me for editing and double checking. The transcribed document was nearly error free, but it still needed some sprucing up.

What a great experience it was reading about my father’s life as a child and a young man on the ranches of South Dakota. I felt like I could hear his voice and his laughter when telling many of the stories. It is a wonderful account of growing up on the Dakota plains (even with the digressions – for instance what does two+ pages describing a Spanish bullfight have to do with it.) On the pages of the document, one can picture Tip, his parents, his siblings, and the many colorful characters in Harding County.

At first, I thought the essay was meant for me and my siblings, but while editing it, it became clear that he meant it for his grandchildren as he addresses them directly several times in the writing. While he mentions that he gave the document a title, I could not find any evidence of it, so I gave it the title of “Tips Musings for His Grandchildren.” I hope they get as much enjoyment from it as I did. I am only profoundly saddened that I am unable to share the transcribed version with my sisters, Karen, Jan, and Jean.

Patrick Melby, August 11, 2026, in Helena, Montana